You begin to interest me…vaguely
Source: 1972 Sears Wishbook.
This 1972 set has all the essential/most fun archaeological gear: helicopter, ATV, machete, pick and shovel (the shovel is my pick), and … animal trap (what, is Roy Chapman Andrews coming along, too?). That mummy is not getting away from the Joes. With inflation, this $14.49 set would cost about $90 today – actual G.I. Joes not included.
The cover of General Electric’s introduction to illuminating buildings using electric lights – a new subject in 1930. Source: General Electric/Archive.org/Building Technology Heritage Library CC-BY-ND 3.0.
The perfect host knows the perfect glass for each drink, but in case you forgot, Libbey provides a visual reminder in this 1962 ad (glasses start at 15¢!). See more Libbey barware here.
Not that long ago, I picked up a set of drinking glasses and matching ice bucket from an antique store down the shore. These glasses were made by the Libbey Glass Company and it’s easy to find sets of this pattern, Silver Foliage, on eBay, Etsy, and other sites, especially if you search for “vintage Midcentury Modern glasses.” It’s no surprise, since Libbey was, and still is, one of the biggest manufacturers of drinking glasses.
Libbey’s most popular patterns were sold for decades. According to some internet sources, Silver Foliage was produced between 1957 and 1978. The Golden Foliage pattern was introduced the same year and produced through 1982 – so those vintage Midcentury Modern glasses on eBay could actually be from the Disco Era.
Golden Foliage was so popular that other manufacturers copied the design on their own glasses (our set has Libbey’s cursive “L” maker’s mark on the bottom of each glass). Meanwhile, Libbey was busy putting the two foliage patterns on different styles and types of glassware (check out the tray and carafe in the ad below). You could probably develop a detailed chronology of Silver Foliage by the yearly catalogs put out by the company; unfortunately they do not seem to be available online.
My first time biking at Whitesbog, the birthplace of the blueberry, was almost a year ago. Today was hotter and the water in Hanover Pond and the cranberry bogs looked very inviting.
As peaceful as it is, Hanover Pond is part of what has been called a “highly engineered agricultural water supply system” for growing cranberries. Whitesbog was already a large, established cranberry operation when Gaunt’s Brook was dammed in 1896 to create Hanover Pond. Water from the pond is channeled into Whitesbog’s Upper Reservoir, built around the same time.
Some kind of horse-birth-watching-with-wine neighborhood party resulted in famed author Susan Orlean drunk-tweeting to widespread acclaim this Friday night. Orlean most recently published that article about the rabbit virus in the New Yorker.
Her tweet-storm confirms her firmly held belief that “anything was a great story as long as I cared about it deeply and wanted just as deeply to tell that story to someone else. And that impulse has never let me down.”
For the actual news reports:
Susan Orlean’s drunk tweets are the song of the summer
Susan Orlean’s Hilarious, Drunken Pandemic Tweet Storm Is a Delight
Pandemic-related photo opportunity; all seen within about 20 minutes. Not shown: nuthatch, chipping sparrow (?), lurking gray squirrels.
This former Standard Oil gas station built around 1930 in Cañon City, Colorado is currently occupied by an antique store. A 2008 National Park Service Preservation Brief notes that beginning in the 1920s, gas companies began designing gas stations to look more like residential buildings to help them blend into their surrounding neighborhoods.
The move toward the house-type station was also a sign of growing competition within the oil industry as businesses worked to garner customer trust and loyalty. Companies developed distinctive brands and signature building forms. Pure Oil, for example was well-known for its English Cottage stations, while Standard Oil favored Colonial Revival designs. The effort to develop iconic signage and stations foreshadowed all-encompassing branding campaigns that dominated gas station design later in the century.
Chad Randl, The Preservation and Reuse of Historic Gas Stations. Preservation Briefs 46.
Summer’s in full swing, and I’ve been revisiting some parks I last rode in colder weather, including Crystal Lake Park and Cadwalader Park, as well as visiting Tyler State Park in Pennsylvania early on the 4th of July. Too busy riding to take many pictures.
While Susan Orlean‘s article The Rabbit Outbreak is about a deadly virus affecting rabbits, it also provides a glimpse into the unusual relationship between humans and hares.*
In the U.S., rabbits were commonly raised for their meat, but “After the Second World War, the demand for rabbit meat began to decline. The number of cattle being raised domestically nearly doubled, and beef, which had previously been something of a luxury, became affordable. … Soon, it became the white meat of choice, and rabbit was marginalized as an occasional dish.”
